I'm a long time reader/stalker of the forum, first time sayer of words here.

This is probably a dumb question but here goes...I'm in the middle of learning Ruby with the 'Well Grounded Rubyist' because I really want to get a good understanding of the language before jumping into a framework.

However, we're in desperate need of a free analytics dashboard for the company that I work for. I wanted to take something like the Metronics Template and use Rails on the back-end.

TL;DR - Do you think I should jump into a rails project in middle of learning Ruby...or wait until I've at least finished this book before jumping into using the framework? Dumb question I know...but wanted to ask anyway

I think you’re in in ideal situation to start building a real-world Rails project. It doesn’t matter that you’re in the middle of learning Ruby: countless developers got into Ruby because of Rails and learned both at the same time (I’m one of them).

The fact that it’s for your company will make it more likely that you will stay motivated and work through to a certain degree of completion, also you can get paid to learn Ruby on Rails, so it’s great!

The only thing I’d be conscious of if I were you is managing expectations: don’t promise a full-fledged, super-well designed, incredibly feature-rich analytics product to your employer; because usually whole teams get tasked with something like this. Limit the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish, communicate it clearly to your stakeholders, and allow yourself some extra time for figuring out gotchas as you go along.

So, be realistic about it. If you and your company recognize this as an opportunity to get some production experience with a non-mission critical application, awesome! I think that's a great approach. But if they need it to be up all the time, or for you to add features quickly, then it might not be as good a fit.

But I'm all about getting paid to learn (that's all that professional software developers really do, so it's good to get in that mindset early). So in your case, I'd be looking to spin this any way I could that would get me learning Rails on company time.

Just make sure everyone shares expectations for the project. Things go wrong... and it's no fun making important decisions based on faulty data.